


White

by vanitaslaughing



Category: Final Fantasy IV, Final Fantasy IV: The After Years
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-02
Updated: 2015-05-02
Packaged: 2018-03-26 19:20:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,665
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3861691
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vanitaslaughing/pseuds/vanitaslaughing
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>White magic's a fickle beast, and Kain simply can't understand why it works the way it does - or even worse, why he can't use it like everyone else.</p>
            </blockquote>





	White

“You almost had it this time!”

“Almost having it doesn’t mean I got it right, though. Bah.”

“Don’t give up like that; it took Cecil several tries as well…”

“Well, but Cecil had it by now. Be honest, Rosa.”

“… He did.”

He wasn’t sure whether he clicked his tongue in frustration or sheer jealousy in that moment – every time he thought about it when he was older, he knew it was bitter jealousy, something he’d always be ashamed of in years to come. But in that very moment Kain Highwind was not sure why exactly he screwed up his face up like that. Rosa quickly dismissed it as the strain that using magic put on an untrained mage-to-be. Thankfully Cecil was not around that very moment, something that Kain was rather thankful for. They were essentially brothers, yes, but there was still this rift between them from back when they were children – children acted without thinking, and Kain had thought the fragile-looking and pale kid adopted by the king was a perfect target. It wasn’t until three years ago that they became friends out of necessity.

This castle was only so big, and avoiding each other when they were in training to join the army was exceptionally hard.

“I know you can do it, though. Just ‘cause you’re a slow learner doesn’t mean you won’t be able to do it eventually! It took me a week to cast Cure, and most of the time I accidentally put people around me to sleep or slowed them down.” Rosa’s smile was as bright as ever, but Kain knew that this was a hopeless case.

According to the younger girl knights should at least know basic healing. The bare necessities on the battlefield other than swinging weapons, and both boys had just agreed with her in order to avoid invoking her anger. Despite the gentle voice and overall appearance, Rosa was scarier than anything they had ever seen before in their lives when angry.

Before Kain could tell her that this was hopeless, though, a voice called across the courtyard. A white mage called Rosa back to training, and with a hurried apology she rushed off. Kain simply watched her go before standing up himself, only to realise that she hadn’t been lying about this strain using magic (or in his case, failing to do so). Dizzy, he leaned against the stone walls for a second and sighed. It would be near impossible to convince her of the opposite, and Cecil having managed to cast the spell did not help Kain the slightest. ‘If Cecil can, then so can you!’, her voice echoed in his head even though she had not said anything like that yet.

If only he could share her radiant optimism in this as well as many other cases…

 

* * *

 

The weak white light was flickering, about to fade. The hands held above the woman’s head were shaking, and were the man casting the spell not naturally as pale as the moon his father had been from, one would have thought that Cecil was dying from the exhaustion written on his bruised and oddly shimmering face. Any other person would have thought Cecil was drenched in sweat, but Kain knew better than that. Lunarian blood, as he now knew, did strange things when mixed with humans, and therefore Cecil’s blood ran transparent rather than red. And that one particular cut across his face was still bleeding, but there was no one there to fix it up. They were out of supplies, somewhere inside the Tower of Babil with no way to get back to where they had initially come from. The Giant of Babil was down for the count, thankfully, but they had gotten lost along the way out. Rosa and Rydia were passed out on the floor, and Edge’s feverish mumbling was dying down, finally. The paladin had managed to get rid of the poison that had taken out three out of five of the people in their group.

Cecil drew a shaky breath before turning around to look at the dragoon who was leaning against his spear. There was a glimmer of distrust in those violet eyes, and Kain knew he very well deserved it. After everything that had happened, Kain had honestly expected a blessed blade struck through his chest, not Cecil looking at him as long and as angrily as he had done once they had fled the Giant of Babil. Then again, Cecil probably had much more to worry about than the potential backstabber among his rows. The injured and his own injuries were probably the lesser of those – the former enemy who turned out to be his brother and his uncle who had gone to take care of the man behind this whole mess, however…

“…” The paladin exhaled slowly and deeply, before raising his voice as much as he could manage. “Keep watch, will you.” Before Kain could do as much as nod to confirm he had heard this, the next in line for Baron’s throne simply fell to the side and stayed the way he landed on the metallic floor of the tower.

Magic strain, doubled with mental and physical exhaustion and injuries were a nasty combination, and one that Kain wished upon no one, not even his worst enemies. He was rather glad he was the only one lacking any serious talent for anything related to magic, but that moment of relief faded almost immediately when he saw that the paladin was still bleeding.

They had both furiously tried patching up their three unconscious teammates as well as they could, before Cecil had cured as much damage as a mediocre mage as he could. First Rosa, then Rydia, then Kain. There had been no sign that Edge had been poisoned, and it had interrupted Cecil during his attempts to patch himself up. Due to their lack of antidotes, Cecil had been forced to attempt to cleanse a poison way too complex for him, and the fact that he succeeded was nothing to be looked down upon.

Kain edged closer to Cecil, his obvious limp and stiff leg reminding him how close this had been. An enemy ambush when they were lost was already bad enough, but it had been even worse that the paladin and white mage had been ready to yell at the dragoon. The tension among the group had been too much, especially after barely making it out of the Giant after already having fought several tough battles, whereas the dragoon was as unharmed as a man who had not been in control of himself for a long time could have been.

The lack of physical injuries was enough to drive the exhausted and terrified group to finally speak their anger, which had just been interrupted by the enemy attack.

The dragoon shook his head and sat down next to Cecil in order to inspect the cut a little closer.

Almost hesitantly Kain put a hand on it after a while. He was muttering the words to this very simple spell that he had only managed once or twice before.

He spent almost an hour attempting to cast it, but to no avail. At some point he simply returned to stand watch, paler than before. Gods, he hated magic.

 

* * *

 

As he had to correct himself on the moon, he only hated when he tried to use magic. Watching the entire group together as they worked like a clockwork mechanism was fascinating somehow. With Cecil managing to fix minor injuries, Rosa could focus on blasting enemies with holy light, while Rydia called upon ancient horrors to scorch and torch and freeze and shatter and whatnot. Edge was faster than anyone else, his nimble movements often paired with the Eblanese equivalent of magic. When Rydia set something on fire, he immediately followed it by lightning strikes, and when he drowned their enemies she followed with icy winds.

Those four were the perfect group, and the first few hours on the moon he was the odd one out. It had been so long since he’d worked with other people like that that he had lost almost every idea of how to time things, and friendly fire was not something he was too keen on, even after all he’d done.

After the first few floors of the Lunar Subterranae he started to fit in, and even though there was this all-too-familiar voice whispering in the back of his head, he managed to stay under control.

During one of their breaks, he simply watched as Cecil repeated the words for his spells.

If there was one good thing about having been on the bad side, it was that he now understood how those two were related. One muttered the words to curing spells, while the other mumbled those that brought destruction. One was tall and stood straight, the other was significantly smaller and often hunched over when he was deep in thought. They were brothers, yes, but it was so glaringly obvious once someone had observed both Cecil and Golbez that it almost hurt.

A bright white spark followed by a slight yellow shimmer around him all of a sudden interrupted his thoughts, and he saw Cecil grin at him.

“Protect.”

“… So it is. But why?”

“Why not? I was just giving it a go. Rosa taught it to me the other day, so I thought I’d—“

“Show off as usual.” Kain snorted and crossed his arms. “Well then, Lord Captain of the Show-Offs, pray tell, how did you do that?”

It had been so long since they’d just joked around like that, it was almost foreign. Cecil looked slightly nervous for a second, and Kain felt dread settle in his stomach. There was no way he could ever fix this, and no spell in the world could help him with that.

He barely paid attention when Cecil actually did show him how to cast the spell itself.

 

* * *

 

The kid was slow, had no patience whatsoever, and blindly rushed ahead when he wasn’t busy being too slow to keep up. It was like dragging an incredibly stubborn mule across the Mysidian continent, but the kid never once complained despite all that. His violet eyes looked unsettlingly familiar, and the way he cast his spells looked like something (or someone) he’d known somehow. Kain had told the kid several times that he had no obligation to stay with him, and that he was slowing the man down, but Ceodore had only shook his head furiously.

Their goal was Baron, and the boy seemed intent on staying with this complete stranger who hid almost his entire face under a makeshift turban and a cape-scarf-thing (Kain hated admitting this, but staying on a mountain for several years left his options for clothing limited – at least this was comfortable enough and didn’t hinder his movement). It wasn’t that much of a surprise when Porom revealed that Ceodore was the son of Cecil and Rosa, though Kain initially panicked for a second. Why their child, of all children in the world?

But after that first shock, it became pretty obvious. The stubborn streak came from Rosa, definitely, and Ceodore had the same defiant glare she had. All of that while having his father’s overthinking personality and often quite reckless art of charging head first into danger the first chance he got. As Kain learned in the Devil’s Road, the kid was also pretty similar to Cecil in more regards than just that – though his blood was red, it seemed oddly light in colour for a boy his age, and now that Kain thought about it, blue hair was something no person on the Blue Plant (ironically) had.

Of all traits to share with his parents, it had to be a rather peculiar one – Ceodore raised his hand and called the party to stop. The white and black mages obliged, as the teenager was the prince of Baron, after all, and Kain simply carried on walking.

“Sir. You’re limping. Badly so. Stop right now, we need to treat whatever’s ailing you, or we’ll never make it out of here alive.”

How in the seven hells had that kid noticed this slight limp, anyway? Not even Kain had particularly noted how much his foot hurt – some spectre had burned him while he’d been busy fending off a zombie. Without a spear in his hands fighting felt alien, but he also felt like he was unfit for the spear for as long as his dark half remained out there.

“We don’t have time to treat minor injuries like that, kid.”

“We have to have right now.” With those words and another of these stubborn and angry glares that felt so familiar, Ceodore won this short-lived argument and Kain found himself unable to say anything else as the blue-haired teenager cast Cura on the burned leg.

It was the first time in about 30 years that Kain actively paid attention to a spell, and he noticed that he knew the words to the spell – his mother, Rosa and Cecil had repeated them a million times throughout his life.

 

* * *

 

The cliffs were as tedious as Kain had imagined them to be, but surprisingly Ceodore kept all comments to himself. Maybe he’d shut down the kid too brutally when the prince had understandably reacted with surprise when Kain had suggested climbing this giant stone wall. It was both a means to stop those fake Baronese from following them, but also Kain admitted he kind of missed the air up high. All those years on Mt Ordeals had left him with even more of a love for high-up places, something that Ceodore hesitantly seemed to share. The higher they got, the more the boy’s initial nervousness faded, and the more Kain started enjoying this. He’d have preferred to go on his own, but he knew he’d load up unnecessary baggage the moment he saw a desperate teenager struggle blindly against an enemy. But Ceodore had progressed nicely, and had started out actively asking Kain for help and opinions and, what surprised the former dragoon the most, actual training. It would seem that the kid had taken a liking to Kain’s unruly fighting style – he was good at magic, yes, but Ceodore appeared to be more of a natural fighter than the rather passive Cecil was.

He started to really like this kid.

In return, the kid opened up to Kain some more, despite the fact that Ceodore didn’t even know his name and only addressed him as “sir”.

At some point Kain suggested something that even surprised himself: “I’ll teach you some tactics, if you try teaching me these spells.”

Naturally, Kain failed a lot, but Ceodore wasn’t as overeager as Rosa, nor did he have the same effect on Kain as Cecil or his mother had. Ceodore wasn’t too patient, and quickly carried on when the spell didn’t seem to stick with Kain’s likings. Where any other white mage would have struggled to teach Kain how to cast something, Ceodore simply shook his head and grumbled something before he declared that spell wasn’t too important either.

The first white magic spell that Kain Highwind managed properly within the first 20 tries was Haste. For some reason the spell had always fascinated him, how it made people move faster. Ceodore looked particularly pleased when the spell worked, and Kain couldn’t help feeling rather proud of both himself and the kid that very moment.

“After you manage the first one properly, the rest’ll get easier. My first spell was Float, actually.” The prince grinned and gestured. “White magic’s trickier than black magic, actually. It’s easier to set something on fire, because you have to simply imagine it on fire, and it’ll work at some point if you have the talent for it. White magic’s one of the grossest things you can torture yourself with. Cuts and minor injuries, sure, but broken bones are godawful to heal. But anyway! Maybe next time we’ll try something a little more complex, like Raise. What do you think, Sir?”

Kain simply blinked and nodded. The situation was dire and as far as Ceodore knew, his father was missing if not dead, and every knight of Baron was acting weirdly under ‘orders of the King’. Was that Rosa’s optimism shining through, or just another characteristic of the kid that he had overlooked in favour of trying to find how much of his childhood friends was in this boy?

 

* * *

 

There was no end to this, apparently. The entire group was moving slowly, and the mood was getting worse and worse. Even the optimists like Luca were starting to rapidly decline as the path into the True Moon continued ever onwards, and none of them ever found a way to help Cecil. The king was almost constantly unable to move, fluttering in and out of consciousness while mumbling nonsense no one understood.

Well, almost no one.

Kain recognised the strange words that escaped Cecil, as he’d heard this language before on the Lunar Whale. It was the Lunarians’ native language, and the man carrying Cecil had to understand this as well. Golbez’ rigid expression never gave away any hint on what the paladin muttered, though. The familiar crystalline floor beneath their feet made crushing sounds, and the five who had been on the moon to defeat Zemus looked more and more spooked. The path was too familiar, and Kain felt a cold shudder run down his spine as he looked ahead. Beyond this floor had been the place where Fusoya and Golbez had fought Zemus, and the place he and Cecil, Rosa, Rydia and Edge had faced off with Zeromus – at least it had been there on the Red Moon. The moment they entered said floor, he knew this was different.

The more Cecil muttered, the more Kain wished he knew how to cast Silence, if only to stop this gibberish out of the mouth that should be ordering them around instead.

 

* * *

 

 

What exactly Ceodore had meant with “white magic is one of the grossest things you can torture yourself with”, Kain learned it after they fought the Mysterious Girl and Bahamut. Bahamut had already been a fierce opponent back when he’d been a younger man, but this time it was brutal. On the Red Moon, Bahamut had never had the intention of killing them; this mind-controlled Hallowed Father however was ordered to wipe them all out. The air of this place smelled of burnt flesh and blood, and Rydia, Ceodore and Kain were the only ones capable of standing and walking still. Rydia handed out supplies, while Ceodore took care of the worst injuries. The occasional scream told Kain that the child was mending broken bones – one of the most painful procedures for the caster and the patient alike.

Eventually Kain stopped to look at Cecil. The paladin had just gotten up, leaning onto his sword and against the cold crystalline walls. He seemed to not be injured at all, but once more Kain knew better. The liquid dripping off his face was not water or sweat, and the distinctive smell of blood choked the air around Cecil – he’d worn fireproof armour, so he was mostly uninjured when it came to burns. But this one particular cut that bled brought back unpleasant memories of the Tower of Babil, with Cecil sprawled out on the floor after collapsing. Kain froze as Cecil smiled.

“You… know, I… honestly thought we’d… never see you again… But here you are, and…” Cecil shook his head slowly, and Kain watched as another drip of transparent blood fell onto the brilliant white and blue armour the paladin wore. “… Thank you.”

“… For what? I screwed everything up. Again.”

“… Ceo.”

“… What about him?”

Cecil jerked his head into the direction of the kid, who currently helped Rosa stand back up. “He was… always so… undecided on things. People only saw him… well, as a miniature copy of me. It bothered him, and he… often said something about that, but… people mostly ignored him. But right now… he accepted it that people will always see him… as that… but he can still be his own person. You… taught him that, didn’t you?”

“No. He learned it by himself. All I did was order him around and ignore him unless he addressed me with a clear and loud voice. He stopped muttering and mumbling and all of that sometime during the time I dragged him around. … Anyway, Lord King of Baron.” Faster than he wanted to, he put a hand on the cut on Cecil’s face and started whispering the incantation to Cura. The blood eventually stopped, and Cecil raised an eyebrow. “There we go.”

“… Kain. Will you… come back home with us… once all of this is over? And if not… for old time’s sake, or Rosa, or me…”

“For the kid? Really? You’re pulling that card on me now, Cecil? What are you, five?”

“…”

“… I’ll come. Pretty sure Ceodore can teach me as much as I can teach him, anyway. The first mage to come through my thick skull.”

“Something Rosa and me… both failed at… because our heads are equally thick, eh…”

“Well, Cecil, and don’t take that personally. But the kid’s more of a pain in the ass than you used to be. If only because he combines your stubbornness and Rosa’s at the same time. Though I’d be lying if I said I wouldn’t love to come home and see how that particular odd white mage progresses.”

Both men laughed as Kain turned around to quickly heal a loudly complaining Edge. Maybe there wasn’t a spell to fix what he’d done wrong, but at least he could make amends for it now that it was all over. And if anything went wrong, Kain was pretty convinced that next time it’d be his unofficial apprentice hauling him back onto the cliff with a slightly smug grin.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Writer's block + copious amounts of playing FF14/staring at The After Years' finished final chapter + suddenly starting to wonder how/why Kain has such a different (and more useful) White Magic set than Cecil + 1am = this goddamned mess
> 
> Also, just to note: Cecil's blood is the way it is because of headcanon shenanigans in my rp group, and Ceodore's blue hair is based on the sprite rather than canon because... personal preferrence, I guess.


End file.
